Robin Miller's article
[1], first published in the
Baltimore Sun
last month, suggests that the makers of the Opera browser ought to
get together with the Norwegian government and mount an
international "dumping" suit against the US govenrment and the two dominant
US browser makers.

Opera Software has at least as much right to be angry at
Microsoft and Netscape as American steel and auto producers
have to be upset by predatory pricing by Asian steel and
auto companies... I expect Opera Software and the Norwegian
government to sue Netscape, Microsoft, and the U.S. Government
for violating the same treaties and international trade
principles held so dear by American smokestack industries.

I haven't seen this suggestion circulated widely 
the Politech mailing list carried it and Rod Amis ran it in both
Generation 21 [1] and
Andover News[2]
(for which Miller sometimes writes)  but if Opera's developers
take the hint you'll see it everywhere.

I think they'd have a hard time proving a dumping argument. They
can try, but if they do, it'll simply be based on blindly trying
to support a company rather than any real economic arguments. This
has bugged me recently about past claims of MS unfairly pricing IE
to get at Netscape. While I am not an open source zealot, and
don't pay much attention to them, I am interested in the basic
economics of the situation (which they do occasionally touch on).

In order to be dumping, in the true sense, you need to be offering
the product below cost. What's the cost for Opera? Well, an
economist would claim, of course, that it's the marginal cost to
produce a copy, and that, being software, would be zero.

So, the answer is that Opera is marking up the margin on their
software too high, and MS and Netscape are simply taking fair,
competitive, advantage of that. It's not an uncompetitive move. If
anything, they've moved to make the market more efficient.

I don't know much about Opera, beyond having tried it once, but if
they folks behind it are as smart as everyone claims they are,
they should look into the basic economics, and some of the points
that the Open Source crowd make concerning how to build a
sustainable business based on giving away the code (whether or not
you give out the source - though the business arguments could be
stronger when the source is given away).

Two students and Web consultants in New Zealand, Oliver Lineham
<oliver at lineham dot co dot nz> and Arun Stephens, have discovered the latest
browser privacy hole, dubbed Cookiemonster[3]. The bug's source is
both flawed implementation of the cookie spec by almost all browser
vendors and a basic hole in the spec itself
[4]. Cookiemonster is
exploitable to do bad things, but even if not exploited it wastes
bandwidth and could lead to a loss of private data.

The nut of it is that cookies set by most domains outside of the US
will be returned to many other visited Web sites within that
country, instead of just to the originating Web site (or its peers).
The flaw arises from the cookie spec
[4], which defines an inexact
method of counting dots to determine whether a visited site is a
peer of the site that set a cookie. The implementation of most
browsers is further flawed, leading to the Cookiemonster.

Lineham's exploit site
[3] could serve as a template for other bug
discoverers to follow. It's lucid, thorough, speedy, and cleanly
designed. The bug's demonstration is gentle on visitors and is
entirely convincing.

TBTF for 1998-11-03
[5] carried word of a strike in Germany by
Internet users demanding more reasonable telephone rates. Brazilian
reader Andre Uratsuka Manoel <andre at insite dot com dot br> sends word of an
email meme that has been spreading in those parts since early
December. A Good Times-like email message calls for an Internet boycott
on January 13 and asks the recipient to forward it to everyone s/he
knows. The message denounces the allegedly high prices of Internet
access in Brazil (around US $25) in contrast to a supposedly
standard price of US $10 for unlimited access. Manoel writes:

The claims of the message are mostly false. Brazilian prices
are not extremely high compared to other countries. US does
not count as it's a mass market and telecommunications are
much cheaper in the US. Also there is no such US $10
unlimited-time plan as far as I know even there. The
Brazilian market of ISPs is very competitive. There are
hundreds of companies (the something-onlines and
something-nets) fighting fiercely for about 3 million users.

What's more, Brazil's telecomms infrastructure is well on the way
to robust competition, unlike that of Germany (where the November
strike had little effect) or Spain (where an earlier strike was
credited for some rate relief).

In the US an ISP rate of $10 per month is far from standard. When
AOL went flat-rate they established a $19.95 price point that many
ISPs then matched. Since that time a number have raised prices or
placed limitations on $20 accounts.

The rogue email message has circulated widely in Brazil and has been
the subject of radio and press coverage. Here is a recent column
[6]
from Maria Ercilia, a respected Brazilian Net columnist. If one can
trust the translation that results from feeding
[6] to
the Babelfish
[7],
she appears to puncture the tenets of the strike call as Manoel
has done. Nonetheless, if you need to download anything from a
Brazilian site, then January 13 might be a good day to do it.

Note added 1999-01-13: Chuck Bury <cbury at softhome dot net> sent a
note about a followup strike French users are promoting for January 31
[7a].
L'Association des Internautes Mécontents (they translate it
"Association of Dissatisfied Netsurfers"
[7b])
claim a partial victory after a strike last month. They are
still in talks with the local telephone monopoly, which charges Netizens
US $1.50 to US $3.00 per hour online, in addition to ISP charges. The
@dim protesters want France Telecom to institute a flat rate for local
calls used for Internet access.

A California judge has issued a temporary restraining order against
the software giant in a case brought by Blue Mountain Arts, a
purveyor of online greeting cards
[8]
and one of the more heavily
trafficked sites on the Web. Blue Mountain noticed that the email client
bundled with the latest beta version of Internet Explorer, Outlook
Express, blocked Blue Mountain's greeting notifications as spam. The
company became suspicious because Microsoft had just announced its
own competing greeting-card service as part of msn.com. Blue
Mountain's cards were also blocked for at least a few days from
customers of WebTV, another Microsoft property. Blue Mountain's direct
appeals to Microsoft yielded no satisfaction and the company went to
court.

The small company's suspicions are understandable in light of all
that has come out about Microsoft's business practices. But Redmond
argued that this time it wasn't behaving anti-competitively, and its
point was bolstered by the fact that its own msn.com greeting cards
were blocked in the same way. (The reported WebTV blockage was
neither confirmed nor explained.) The judge ordered Microsoft to assist
Blue Mountain in modifying its greeting cards so they pass through
the Outlook Express spam filter. Microsoft must also warn consumers
of the email client's blocking action.

Thanks to Rob Mayhew <wizworks at istar dot ca>, who was the first of
several readers to suggest covering this story.

On the last day of 1998 the Commerce Department released new
regulations
[9] (79K) implementing the looser guidelines for crypto
exports announced in September. Here is news.com's story on the
announcement
[10]. US vendors of data-scrambling software can now
sell strong crypto to foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies in the
fields of insurance, health and medicine, and online commerce, after
a one-time review by the Commerce Department. See this list
[11] of
the 44 approved countries for such exports. Privacy advocates have
criticized
[12] the new regulations as favoring large corporations
but doing nothing for ordinary citizens or non-commercial users such
as human-rights groups.

Robert Chin <qin at laya dot com> and compatriots have unveiled the
OpenQubit site
[13] to anchor a collaborative effort aimed at developing
a simulation API for a quantum computer. So far 64 people have
signed on
[14] to help or at least to kibbitz. The site is holding a
logo contest
[15]  the interim logo owes perhaps too much to
QuickTime. If you have any interest in the development of quantum
computation, put OpenQubit on your bookmark list, along with the
mothership [16].
(The graphic at left was adapted from one found on qubit.org.)

The article on the legal aspects of linking in TBTF for 1998-12-15
[17] drew a few replies worth sharing. First, from John Robert
LoVerso <john at loverso dot southborough dot ma dot us>
[18]:

The "linking" issue interests me, partially because I think
it is all legal nonsense. See, for instance, my "daily
comics" page at
[19]. This is generated automatically, by
mining the comics pages provided elsewhere. I don't copy the
images, I just find the location of the images and include
that URL in an <img> tag. I justify this as legal by this
statement:

Important Note On The Content Provided Here
There is no content provided here. There are no copies of
images or comics here. These are all just pointers to
other web resources. If you see images below, it is
because you've instructed your Web browser to fetch those
resources. That is not my doing.

And David Coppit <coppit at cs dot virginia dot edu>
[20] writes to point out
his Daily Update tool
[21], which yanks Web content and integrates
it into your own page.

Some chaps at Florida State University with too much time on their
hands offer us the Silicon Zoo[22]: a collection of photomicrographs
of the little drawings and doodles with which chip designers adorn
their creations. Here's how they did it
[23]. The Zoo offers 35
tributes lovingly engraved in silicon at the micron level including:

More than you ever wanted to know about lunar chronology and terminology

In 1999 January and March will each enjoy two full moons, and
February will have none at all. This happens far more rarely than once
in a blue moon, as the second full moon in a month is called.
According to the Blue Moon page
[28],
blue moons are governed (to a
first order) by the 19-year Metonic cycle of lunar phases. Over one
Metonic cycle there are 235 lunar months (236 full moons) and 228
calendar months. So once in a blue moon amounts to about 8 times
in 228, or 3.5 per cent. (228 calendar months differs from 235
lunar months by about 2 hours. Then there are leap years to consider.
Calculate blue moons for any year at
[31].)
February last lacked a full moon two Metonic cycles
ago, in 1961, and will miss one again on the next cycle in 2018. The
last time a moonless February was surrounded by blue moons in
January and March was in 1915.

Note added 1999-01-08: Michael Cooney <mbc42 at groucho dot ctel dot
net> covered the unusual 1999 moons last September in his (paper only)
newsletter The Friendship Letter, which he calls "an old-fashioned,
deliberately un-slick, 8-page printed, hold-in-your-hand newsletter... a
neighborhood newsletter for people who don't live near each other." One of
his readers,
retired physicist John MacArthur <jmac at sover dot net>, sent the
following explanation of what once in a blue moonreally means.
It is posted here by permission.

Your comment about the "blue moons" in 1999 caught my attention, for
two reasons. First, let me describe one such occurrence a few years
back (I don't have next year's almanac, yet). The second full moon
that time was listed as August 31 in the local news, but when I
looked it up in the almanac it turned out to be on September 1! It
took me a few seconds to realize what had happened: the almanac was
using Universal time (4 or 5 hours ahead of Eastern time, depending
on whether we are on daylight or standard time), and in this case,
the second full moon actually occurred in the next month. My worry
was this: how could the moon be "blue" for one person, but not so
for someone a time zone or two further east? What if they lived
close together, but on opposite sides of the time-zone line? (Make
up your own scenario of conversations!) The second problem relates
to the familiar expression "once in a blue moon" which we all know
refers to something really rare. But you have just demonstrated that
they really aren't very rare if they occur about once a year or so.
So what is the scoop?

The explanation is that the definition of "blue moon" that you are
using is apocryphal. I don't know who made it up, but it appeared on
the scene only a few years ago, whereas the old phrase has been
around for at least many hundreds of years, if not more. It refers
to a moon that appears actually, really, blue, caused by a peculiar
rare kind of dust in the air. When you look at the moon through
ordinary dust, as at moon rise or set when the dust is the common
variety, it looks orange or red  just as the sun looks red at
sunset. But on rare occasions, usually when there are very distant
forest fires raging or there has just been a major explosive-type
volcanic eruption not too far upwind, the dust is of that special
size (just barely bigger than the wavelength of visible light) and
the extinctions of light colors are reversed (so-called Mie
scattering), giving rise to a moon that really, truly looks blue!

Most people never have that experience, since the combination of
events necessary is quite rare  just the right size of dust
particles (and no others) and, of course, you have to be there at
the right time. I am one of the lucky ones. I happened to be in
Florida about two days after the Mexican volcano El Chichon blew
its top (April, 1983), the sky was otherwise clear (clouds would
hide it, of course) and the moon happened to be near full  and a
beautiful, clear, pale blue! I recommend it, but it only occurs once
in a blue moon.

We conclude with an enumeration of the common names for the year's
full moons, synthesized from a variety of sources
[32],
[33],
[34].

TBTF has finally adopted an unambiguous and sort-friendly date
terminology based on ISO 8601
[35].
("And about time!" the readers cry.
Thanks to Dan Kohn <dan at teledesic dot com> for the final push.) I have
reworked all the internal links on tbtf.com  please write me if
you find problems in this area. But feel less compelled to tell me
about broken external links: the older the issue the less the
compulsion. The links work on the date of publication and I make an
effort to keep them alive for weeks more, but inevitably linkrot
[36] sets in over time.